Property and liberty
The land law did more than establish hierarchies of wealth. Along with
the ownership of land, the actaof medieval kings conveyed varying
extents of freedom. Whereas the property recoverable by writs of right
or mort d’ancestor must have been held ‘in demesne as of fee’, the com-
plainant in an assize of novel disseisin was required to say that the
defendant had unjustly seised or damaged, since an appointed date of
limitation, what he had possessed as a ‘free tenement’ (liberum tene-
mentum).^102 By contrast the land of villeins was held at the will of their
lords, who alone could sue for it in the king’s courts—servile tenants
had no access to them. In the thirteenth century, a successful suit for a
person’s lands in the courts of the king of England would consequently
become the most effective way of asserting free status, and other tests
like the level of services due to the landlord, or ability to ‘go with one’s
lands where one chose’ (already adduced by Domesday claimants to
prove they were liberi homines), were used mainly to support or counter
this proof of freedom.^103
Being a ‘freeholder’ (a liber tenens) was the minimum qualification
for free status, but a prelate or noble expected to receive more positive
freedoms with his lands. Libertasand its derivatives (e.g. the ‘liberality’
[liberalitas] with which gifts were made, to be enjoyed quiete et libere,
or ‘more freely’—liberius—than by other beneficiaries) are ubiquitous
expressions in medieval charters, and in the great majority of cases they
refer to grants of territorial immunity, not of personal freedom.^104 From
the beginning, privilegia libertatiswere expected of Frankish and Anglo-
Saxon kings by ecclesiastical landowners, and many twelfth-century
royal actamerely confirmed these, the Emperor Frederick I deeming
‘nothing more worthy or healthy than to restore the peace of holy
churches, multiply their advantages and joyfully reform them to the
state of their ancient liberty (in antique sue libertatis statum... feliciter
eas reformare)’.^105 An essential element of early immunities was the the
exclusion of royal and episcopal agents, of ‘any power of public law’,
from the immunists’ lands, which may be seen as the loading on to land-
lords of the peace-keeping functions which kings did not then have the
Property and liberty 211(^102) Ibid. 167 ff.
(^103) English Lawsuits, 55 (no. 31); C. T. Flower, Introduction to the Curia Regis Rolls,
1199–1230 A.D., Selden Soc. 62 (London, 1943), 222–34; Harding, England in the Thirteenth
Century, 74–5.
(^104) For what follows, see A. Harding, ‘Political Liberty in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, 55
(1980); K. Arnold, ‘Freiheit im Mittelalter’, Historisches Jahrbuch, 104 (1984).
(^105) Conradi I, Heinrici et Ottonis 1 Diplomata, 92. 15 , 461. 20 , 589, 621; Heinrici II et
Arduini Diplomata, no. 29; Friderici I Diplomata, 1158–67, 288. 28 , and cf. 164. 25 , 172. 23 ,
- 28 , 272. 20 , 291. 43 , 316. 36 , 320. 22 , 460. 1 etc.